ideatree design & why I spent my summer at Olin

This summer, as you may already know, I stayed at Olin to work on a "project" of mine. Well, here's my quick explanation of IdeaTree Design, (also: "project.")

IdeaTree Design started with one of the 'activist' groups on campus called Olin Students for Awesome. In an attempt to further the positive social impact that this group could have in the local community, founding members of IdeaTree came up with the idea of a non-profit, socially conscious, student-led design firm "where everybody wins!" The plan is to take advantage of technical expertise from Olin students and students from neighboring colleges (yay interdisiplinary design work!) and allow them to spend time getting professionally design experience (and research/academic credit) working on projects for non-profits who normally couldn't afford to pay a design firm for their design needs (what we call "The Non-Profit Gap"). That's the short and sweet version of what we're doing...Here's one example of what kind of work we'll be doing.

There is a home for the mentally and physically disabled in Chicago where wheelchair-bound residents are ensured about 10-20 minutes a day to get pushed around the nice facility. The problem is that this takes up a lot of the caretakers time, so we were asked if we could design some sort of wheelchair coupler to allow motorized wheelchairs to tow 1-2 other wheelchairs behind them so that residents could have more time to go around outside, time that caretakers currently can't afford to offer whenever residents would like it... In any case, several students would be assigned to the project and by the end of the semester we would have a functional version of a wheelchair coupler (or 10).

This summer I spent a lot of time working on setting everything up for this non-profit, from getting research credit to finding projects, getting incorporated, writing a business plan, laying out a website, etc...all the sort of business nonsense that we won't have time to do during the year.